“How do you mean, Dad?”
“Well, I’ve grilled murder suspects by the hundreds in my time, and I’ve never run across one with just this combination of frankness and mulishness. He’s made some important admissions, such as being in the penthouse during the general crime period, but he keeps insisting he left her there alive. He won’t budge from it.”
“Why would you expect him to admit it?” asked the elder McKell. “Don’t murderers always deny their guilt?”
“Not as often as people think. Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s telling the truth.”
“That’s nonsense, Dad,” Ellery said. “The man is guilty. I proved—”
“Maybe you didn’t, son.”
Ellery gaped at him.
“In any event, Inspector,” growled Ashton McKell, “all this is your problem, not ours. Why have you brought Dane back into it?”
“Because he may be able to help us clear this up once and for all.
“Let’s go back over this,” the old man said in a head-on, plodding sort of way. And he ticked off the time elements of the crime. Sheila Grey had sent Ashton away at a few minutes past ten — at 10:03 P.M. Then she had sat down and written her letter about Dane to the police. “We’ve had people write out the letter in longhand, as she did, trying to time the writing at the pace she must have used — it was fresh on her mind, a matter of urgency and fear, so she couldn’t have written slowly.
“Five policewomen tried it. The quickest time ran a few seconds over four minutes, the longest just under six. Let’s take the longest time. She had to go to her desk after you left, Mr. McKell, she had to sit down, take paper and pen from her drawer, write — and let’s even say she read the letter over, which she may not have done — seal it in the first envelope, write on it ‘To be opened in the event I die of unnatural causes,’ place the first envelope into the larger envelope, and write on that, ‘For the Police.’
“Now we’ve gone all through this, and no matter how we figure it, she simply couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes at the outside for the whole procedure. I think ten minutes is away over — eight would be far more likely. But let’s even call it ten. So she was finished with the letter and the sealing and so on by 10:13 at the latest. But she was shot at 10:23. What happened during those ten minutes? Okay, the killer came. But did it take him ten minutes to get the revolver out of the bedroom drawer and shoot her?”
“They talked,” Dane suggested.
“And she picked up the phone and called the precinct with the killer standing over her? It won’t wash. Remember what she said to the operator — that it was an emergency. When she got the precinct sergeant, she told him, ‘Someone is in my apartment,’ and you’ll recall he said she was whispering, as if she didn’t want to be overheard. No, she didn’t spend any of the time talking to the murderer. Still — there it is. We don’t have a full picture of that ten minutes, between the time she finished the letter and the shot the sergeant heard over the phone.”
“I don’t understand what’s bugging you, Dad,” Ellery said testily. “It’s simple. Part of the ten minutes was consumed by Ramon’s coming in and shooting her. The rest of it was just nothing — before he came she sat there, or worked on a sketch, or did something else inconsequential but time-consuming.”
“But Ramon got there, he says, at 10:15,” Inspector Queen retorted. “He insists he only stayed four to five minutes at the most. That would bring us to, say, 10:20. If Ramon is telling the truth, there was enough time for somebody else to get into the penthouse after he left.”
“If he’s telling the truth,” remarked Ellery caustically. “Or if his calculation of the time was accurate, which seems highly unlikely to me. What was he doing, holding a stopwatch on himself? We’re dealing with minutes, Dad, not hours! I don’t know what’s the matter with you today.”
The Inspector said nothing.
And Ellery looked at him very hard indeed. “And another thing,” he said. “Ramon denies killing her. Did he say what he was doing up there?”
“Collecting a blackmail payment.”
“What!”
“Ramon was blackmailing Sheila, too?” Ashton cried.
“That’s right. He was playing both sides of the street.”
“But why should Sheila have paid him money?”
“He says because of you, Mr. McKell. She didn’t care about her reputation, but she did about yours, and she was willing to pay Ramon to keep his mouth shut.”
Ashton fell silent.
“Incidentally, she was smarter than you were,” the old man said dryly. “Ramon says she figured out right off that he was the blackmailer — that he’d probably followed you one Wednesday to find out what you were doing those afternoons and evenings, and learned that you were visiting her apartment in disguise. But she paid him anyway, to protect you.”
Dane’s father turned away. Lutetia’s profile set. But then it softened, and she leaned over and took her husband’s hand.
“Anyway, Ramon says he came up that night to put a harder squeeze on. He was collecting a thousand a month from her, too, but he was losing the money on the horses a lot faster than he was raking it in from you people, and he was leery about tackling you for more, Mr. McKell, figuring that a woman would be a softer touch. So he went to her. He says she was lying spread out in a chair looking pretty sick, half unconscious, holding her throat. She hardly seemed to know he was there, he said. He suspected something was very wrong and he beat it. But not before he spotted the letter addressed to the police in her handwriting, thought there might be something juicy in it for him, and put it in his pocket. That’s his story, and I believe him.”
“How did he leave the apartment?” Ellery asked in a half snarl. “By which door? Did he say?”
“The service door and service elevator.”
“That would explain why Dane didn’t run into him,” began Ellery in a mutter; but then he subsided. No one said anything for a long time.
“I still don’t see what all this has to do with me,” Dane said finally.
The Inspector did not reply, and Ellery stirred and said, “It’s true that if Sheila was that easy a mark for blackmail — and it shouldn’t be too hard to trace thousand-dollar withdrawals from her account with dates Ramon ought to be able to supply — it isn’t likely he would want to kill her... That would mean that my analysis of the crime was wrong — that the blackmailer was not the killer... It’s because of the loose time situation... You’re more than half inclined to think, then, that between 10:13 and 10:23 two people came to Sheila’s apartment? Ramon the blackmailer, and then the killer? That Ramon did not shoot her?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Then why did Ramon run away,” Judy burst out, “when Mr. Queen accused him of the shooting?”
“Blackmail isn’t exactly a light rap, Miss Walsh,” said Inspector Queen. “He panicked. Especially when, on top of it, he was accused of murder.”
But Ellery was shaking his head and mumbling, more to himself than to them. “There’s something awfully wrong here... We know how Sheila selected the names for her annual fashion collections. She did it consistently for seven consecutive years, making anagrams out of the names of her successive lovers. And this last one is Lady Norma, which is an anagram of Ramon. Is it possible ‘Norma’ came from some other name? ‘Roman’? ‘Moran’? I can’t think of any others... Did you dig up another man in her life since Eddwin Odonnell, Dad?”
The Inspector shook his head.
“Then it still gets down to Ramon. He was more than Sheila’s blackmailer, he was also her lover. And if he was her lover, she dropped him for Dane, and jealousy proved stronger than greed. In my book Ramon remains her killer.”